In contrast to the Big Ideas and novelistic pyrotechnics found in the “classic” novels, these three books are quieter, and more personal. In the interview I conducted earlier this week with Anne McLean, we talked a bit about the “Julio Cortazar” that Archipelago has been constructing through the publication of From the Observatory, The Diary of Andres Fava, and Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. In part, this is due to my own blindspot when it comes to poetry and poetic writing in part, this is due to the elusive mingling of images and ideas present in this short, dense text. 62: A Model Kit, which applied the theory explicated in chapter 62 of Hopscotch, opens with a preface warning that “not a few readers will notice various transgressions of literary convention here.” Some of the ideas in his short stories are mind-blowing in a consciousness-raising, you-must-be-high sort of way.īut in my opinion, From the Observatory is the most challenging of all his books that I’ve read. Hopscotch is a tricky book, even putting aside the jarring juxtapositions that arise from the strange way of reading it (if you follow the prescribed path, you read a bunch of chapters out of order). It’s not like any of Cortazar’s books are easy. It also happens to be this week’s Read This Next title. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, “seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!” It is the setting where the usual restraints of traditional novelistic order are discarded and the reader is taken on a daring and exciting new experience of life itself, The New York Times described 62: A Model Kit as “deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious.” Library Journal said 62: A Model Kit is “a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time.The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece I wrote about Julio Cortazar’s From the Observatory, which is translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and forthcoming from Archipelago Books.

The New York Times 62: A Model Kit Fictionįirst published in English in 1972 and long out of print, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar’s brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called “City.” As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo.

Deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious.

62 by Julio Cortázar